Re: Advice for online events

[Yasuaki Kudo]

Wow!
 
I would love to get in touch with you!!

Together we my partners, I am currently pursuing:

* https://meet.coop BigBlueButton hosting cooperative
* Online "Digital School" with Canvas LMS + BigBlueButton

I will email you as well!

Cheers,
Yasu


> On Jun 7, 2020, at 02:57, Ark <cloudneozero@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi list!
> 
> I belong to a science group at my university. We promote science and critical 
> thinking by doing events with experts about different topics. We try to get 
> science to the people.
> 
> Our public activities have stopped due to the pandemics. We're considering 
> doing them online. We have community principles and we're trying to adopt 
> libre software (we're spanish speakers). Right now our site uses mezzanine, a 
> free python CMS and it's using Debian 10 as its OS. We have mailman3 as our 
> email communication tool and we've been using Jitsi Meet for our internal 
> coordination meetings. Sadly, we don't have the resources to have our own 
> hardware infrastructure so we use a VPS in digitalocean.
> 
> Our events are small. The most popular one has, at most, 60 attendants. The 
> average is between 25 and 30 people. The experts talk for a while (around 45 
> to 60 minutes) and then the participants can intervene. We'd like to allow 
> them to talk by microphone, only in the second part.  We're not sure how many 
> people we'll have when we go online, but we want to use free software as much 
> as we can. By reading this mailing list, I think that for an open talk with 
> only a couple of people (the experts and the moderator) the best bet is 
> BigBlueButton. As it's a tool aimed at education, it seems to provide good 
> tools for our purpose.
> 
> I'm writing to the list to obtain guidance. First, ¿is there a more 
> recommended VPS, or an alternative?. We really don't have the resources for 
> our own machines and the university is in no position right now to provide 
> them (the talks were made in company with the library, but they don't have 
> the resources either). DigitalOcean has a problem; if we turn off the 
> machines they still charge us. We can pay for a machine with the requirements 
> for BBB, only by the hour, and only the big names like AWS, GCC or Azure seem 
> to charge like that. We want to avoid especially those big companies.
> 
> Second of all, is there an alternative for live streaming with free 
> software?. The common answer in Jitsi lists when there are many participants 
> is using Youtube, but we don't want to use Google. If they're the only 
> option, we'd rather not live stream.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestion. We owe a lot to the free software community, 
> especially in these times.